I took my first woodworking class, Fundamentals of Woodworking, last February at the Woodworkers Club. It was taught by a very nice gentleman who had been woodworking for 20 years and seemed to know a lot about the art. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he felt you should go ahead and purchase more expensive equipment since you likely wouldn’t have to replace it as quickly. He had a very specific way that he felt a chisel should be sharpened. At the time, I couldn’t see myself using a chisel so I found his demonstration somewhat tedious. He talked about different ways that lumber is cut and the resulting grains you would see. I remember thinking, “Yeah, yeah, come on, man! Get to the good stuff. Let’s build this bookshelf.” To his credit, I was probably too excited to fully hear everything he had to offer on the subject.
It was another six months before I signed up for my second class. I was in the middle of a project that seemed to have more back steps than forward ones and was looking for some additional skills to hopefully help me finish it. The morning of the first day I was a ball of energy and arrived twenty minutes early. The instructor started the class in the same way the other instructor had. He went through pretty much the same description of woods, grain patterns, etc. This time it was different for me. I felt like a sponge. I was taking notes and asking more specific questions of what I had seen at home. Since I had a few “projects” under my belt, what he was saying made more sense and seemed more relevant. To make things even better, he was teaching me things I hadn’t heard in the first class. Or maybe they were things that had been said but I just hadn’t heard them.
In class, I sat in front of a woman who was passionate about woodturning. During the lunch break, we talked for a bit. I told her I had picked up woodworking as a hobby in the last year since I liked building things with my hands. She asked me, “Why did you choose wood? You could have chosen other things.” My initial thought was that I had already answered that question but then I could tell she wanted me to dig deeper. I wasn’t really sure how to answer and so I grabbed one of my leg pieces off the workbench, ran my hand across it and said, “Because wood is beautiful, I love to touch it and a fresh cut piece of wood smells amazing!” She immediately had a huge smile on her face, grabbed one of her legs and enthusiastically agreed with me, “It’s ALIVE!”
At the end of day one, I had 4 legs with mortises. My end table didn’t look like much yet but I felt accomplished. I now knew how to use a plunging router. I was beginning to accept that I would need to learn to make/use jig and the place for a chisel in the workshop. I learned that you sharpen a hand planer blade in the same way you sharpen a chisel and that for some, wood is alive.